Thanks. I'd like to think it just keeps getting better given that between the start of chapter 1 and where it's up to now 4 years and a LOT of other writing has happened.

Bugger, the rated R blurb is still up there. Right now it's PG-13 at best, honest. I just toss the rated R blurb up on everything so that if I feel like pushing things later on I'm not constrained by having said something would be PG chapters ago.

I havent read all of it, i'm still on the first post, but I love the way you have written. Technical and detailed, but to the point and concise. The wankship comments will come, and I would have to agree with them, but to a certain extent I can excuse it for the pure readability.

"He was the best of us. They struck without provocation, there was no reason. Animals! Brutal! They deserve no mercy! Strike them down, follow them back to their base and kill all of them, all of them! No mercy!" - Delenn

My rationalization for the ship is pretty simple. I've never seen a good technical reason why it couldn't be done. I know, probably the same reason every ship like this exists. Still, we see a ship like the GCS, a combination of science ship, floating hotel, long distance traveler, and speed demon face down dedicated warships all the time and win. So I asked the question, what happens if you take a ship like that, rip out everything that doesn't go PEWPEW or prevent you from getting blown up? Well, we've seen the Defiant, a positively tiny warship with more firepower than a Galaxy but less than a 1/10th a Galaxy's size. Well what if you gave a Galaxy sized ship the same treatment?

It doesn't fit in with the established world very well, I know that. Mostly it just brings some uncomfortable questions to the fore like, "Well why didn't they do something like this before?" Well in this alternate universe the Federation finally decided after the Dominion War that enough was enough and decided to go all out. Far as I can see there's no overriding technical reason the Federation couldn't do it. All the arguments boil down to "Well they just don't do it like this," and I can't argue with that. Which is why this is an AU that branches off of traditional Trek's time line in 2379.

If people don't like the ship itself I'm fine with that. I knew when I started a lot of people would hate it. I don't think it detracts too much from the story itself too much.

Exactly the point, I may dislike the ship, but the story you have written is of an overridingly good quality, enough to more than make up for my personal bias.

"He was the best of us. They struck without provocation, there was no reason. Animals! Brutal! They deserve no mercy! Strike them down, follow them back to their base and kill all of them, all of them! No mercy!" - Delenn

What wankship? The Monsoon? She almost a thousand meters long. I'd be shocked as hell if a warship that size wasn't decked by weapons. Besides, you did a great job of telling what, where and why everything was.

"He was the best of us. They struck without provocation, there was no reason. Animals! Brutal! They deserve no mercy! Strike them down, follow them back to their base and kill all of them, all of them! No mercy!" - Delenn

Well, the Akira has 15 TLs and is a fraction of the size. Maybe its not so much a stretch.

As too the phasers, the Captain stated that the arrays were in fact built to be smaller and seperate systems. So it may take several of them to equal the space taken by normal arrays. The Excelsior class model had somewhere over two dozen phasers because of how they were spaced and doubled up. I took this in the same measure that each array here was just very small in order that it would be harder to knock out all of the weapons points on the ship. Thats IMO of course.

Deepcrush wrote:Well, the Akira has 15 TLs and is a fraction of the size. Maybe its not so much a stretch.

As too the phasers, the Captain stated that the arrays were in fact built to be smaller and seperate systems. So it may take several of them to equal the space taken by normal arrays. The Excelsior class model had somewhere over two dozen phasers because of how they were spaced and doubled up. I took this in the same measure that each array here was just very small in order that it would be harder to knock out all of the weapons points on the ship. Thats IMO of course.

Those figures aren't unreasonable now its explained a bit more.

"He was the best of us. They struck without provocation, there was no reason. Animals! Brutal! They deserve no mercy! Strike them down, follow them back to their base and kill all of them, all of them! No mercy!" - Delenn

Like Deepcrush said, the Akira has 15 tubes, so I don't think 18 is really excessive on a ship many times larger. Also, the Monsoon class has pretty much the same plan form as the Sovereign. If you compare masses of the two ships the Monsoon only mounts slightly more phaser arrays per ton. Also, the phaser arrays are broken up. They aren't 54 long continuous Galaxy style arrays. They're broken up in to multiple smaller arrays.

If you look at the Sovereign the dorsal saucer array isn't a single array, but a collection of multiple arrays. Same thing with the Monsoon.